Corporate and Foundation Relations

Advancement leaders are under pressure to grow philanthropic revenue from every available source. As a result, many chief advancement officers are increasingly concerned that their institutions are not maximizing giving from corporations and foundations. Our white paper is organized in three sections with 9 best practices to maximize your institution’s unique potential for CFR growth.

Executive Summary: Challenges in increasing corporate and foundation philanthropy

The corporation and foundation philanthropy landscape has become more competitive in recent years. Corporations are building deeper partnerships with fewer organizations and supporting projects that contribute to their business goals. Foundations are limiting funding to projects with a defined scope and high potential for large-scale social impact, and they are prioritizing institutions with whom they have previously worked.

Despite this competitiveness, colleges and universities have key opportunities to expand current corporate and foundation relations (CFR) engagements and gain new partners through strategic investments and planning.

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Understand your institution’s CFR potential

Opportunities for corporate and foundation support are limited by forces outside of advancement’s control, including an institution’s location, faculty research priorities, and alumni career paths.

Before setting new strategies or reallocating investments for CFR, use this opportunity diagnostic to determine where your institution has the greatest CFR potential and where to focus immediate efforts—either in maximizing current engagements or by laying the groundwork for future success.

Maximize current engagements with one-stop shops

Campus divisions with corporation or foundation connections, like sponsored research, philanthropy, and employer relations, are often housed in separate divisions with different contact people for external partners. Yet corporations and foundations seek a single point-of-entry to ask questions and identify new opportunities.

To deepen current partnerships, take stock of engagements on campus, make the institution easy to contact, and assign staff to identify growth opportunities. Additionally, institutions can create a “one-stop shop” housing all corporation and foundation engagement functions.

Partnership dashboard

At Purdue University, advancement and research staff worked together to create a partnership dashboard that tracks a corporation’s engagements across campus. To create the dashboard, staff from research and CFR worked together to assemble a database identifying every touchpoint that a corporation has on campus, from advancement to research, career services, and professional education.

Assembling the database was the first time that these stakeholders came together to aggregate corporate partnerships data. Afterwards, data access and editing permissions were assigned to staff across campus to ensure that the data is updated consistently. The updated database allows CFR staff to see a complete picture of current engagements. It is also communicated to internal partners that working together will be necessary in order to maintain and expand corporate partnerships, particularly for companies that already have multiple engagements on campus.

Centralized web portal

After organizing internal data, create a web portal that provides an easy-to-navigate experience for external partners. Websites at institutions of higher education often present a variety of partnership opportunities and numerous points-of-contact. This makes institutions appear disorganized—and corporations will move on to other partners.

The University of Louisville’s centralized web portal prevents this confusion. The portal provides the impression that there is a one-stop shop for corporate and foundation relations by providing a menu of potential partnership opportunities and contact information for each area. Drop-down menus are organized based on the reasons why a corporation may be interested in a partnership.

Relationship concierge

The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) established a relationship concierge for corporate partners. Full-time staff serve as the main point of contact for corporate partners and are responsible for finding additional value within the ongoing partnership. Success is evaluated based on both deepening current relationships and establishing partnerships with new corporations.

Industrial liaison program

Moving beyond small staff investments, institutions with the potential to greatly expand corporate relationships should consider establishing a true one-stop shop. For corporations, a one-stop shop makes it easy to access university resources, and can accelerate the speed at which engagements begin. When a corporation evaluates engagement opportunities at multiple colleges or universities, a one-stop shop could make the difference between competing institutions.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Industrial Liaison Program is supported by over 50 staff members and serves the sole purpose of connecting corporations around the globe with MIT’s programs and expertise. The industrial liaison program takes the lead in connecting corporations to any opportunity in which they are interested on campus, from faculty members and labs to campus startups and student recruitment programs. The program also sponsors events for corporate partners to network with each other, as well as connections to professional education programs that may interest external supporters.

Campus-Wide Knowledge Housed in One-Stop Shop

Lay groundwork for future success

Regardless of whether an institution is ready to establish a one-stop shop, future CFR success depends on strong partnerships across campus. To succeed in the competitive corporate and foundation funding landscape, collaboration is required. Deans, faculty members, career services, and other campus stakeholders have an opportunity to work together to craft proposals, identify engagements, and steward funders.

Campus roadshow

To show deans (and other campus partners) what proposals to prioritize for
corporations and foundations, host a campus roadshow with data and stories about successful CFR proposals. The roadshow can be a standalone presentation, a part of leadership retreats, or an on-demand session as needed by academic divisions.

Provide opportunities for attendees to share success stories, ideas for future
proposals, and questions about how they can strengthen their work with external partners. This allows academic partners to learn from each other, and keeps CFR staff informed about their current research initiatives. Staff can use this information to connect current prospects to faculty working in their areas of interest.

Foundation funding support system

After educating deans about the possibilities within CFR, staff should proactively connect with faculty members seeking research funding. In particular, many foundation grants are earmarked for early- to mid-career faculty members, yet these researchers may not know how to prepare a proposal for private support.

The University of California, San Diego supports these new faculty members with a foundation funding support system. CFR staff founded the program to assist new researchers in identifying and applying for foundation grants. In the program’s first year, it generated an additional $4 million of funding for early-career researchers. These grants were unlikely to have been identified by researchers seeking funding without the program’s support.

Reverse career fair

To show employers how they can engage on campus, Oklahoma State University holds an annual reverse career fair. At the fair, student organizations staff booths and corporate recruiters have the opportunity to walk around, meet students, and hear about what organizations are doing on campus.

The fair is held on the morning of the traditional career fair so that recruiters only have to make one trip to campus. Recruiters have to walk through the reverse fair in order to access their booths for the traditional career fair, leading to a 100% attendance rate.

Key Elements of the Reverse Career Fair

Athletics partnership

After working with career services and academic partners, CFR staff should focus on opportunities to partner with athletics. Corporations increasingly want to sponsor priorities across campus, but athletics staff often maintain an “athletics first” focus— they only negotiate sponsorships for athletics, and CFR staff are rarely participants in the process. When corporate relations in athletics is outsourced to a marketing firm, external account managers have few incentives to work with the CFR team to bundle multiple priorities into one sponsorship agreement.

Moving forward, CFR staff and advancement leaders need to show athletics staff how working together allows all participants to reap greater rewards than working alone. Sponsorship negotiations at institutions of all sizes should include partners across campus, so that corporations see numerous engagement opportunities upfront. This provides avenues to maximize a company’s visibility on campus while increasing revenue for the college or university.

Board member networking form

CFR staff at Providence College realized that board members often had close relationships with foundation decision-makers and expected the College to pursue projects with them. However, staff had never systematically collected information regarding who knew whom. In order to ask about connections in a non-obtrusive way, the CFR team created a board member networking form that is distributed at in-person board meetings.

Instead of asking board members about every possible foundation, CFR staff curated a list of top foundation prospects—25 national foundations and 25 local foundations that were likely to be interested in the College’s projects and priorities. This showed board members that not every foundation is a potential target for future grants.